Learning the hard way (revisited)

I haven’t done much today. The only thing I did was to reglue the piece I cut off yesterday back on to the router table top. About 3:00 AM EST I realized that I cut off to much and didn’t leave enough material for the mitre guage slot. It didn’t turn out to bad but it irritates me that I didn’t think of this before I made the cut. Oh well. What’s more is that I stained my table saw surface with glue that bled though the news papaer that I had under my glue up. I realize that I should use my assembly bench. Oh! Wait! I don’t have room for an assembly bench! I thought about getting a retractable window blind that I could mount to the wall next to my table saw. That way when I need to use it during an assembly I can pull it across my table saw so that my table saw surface stays as clean and stain free as possible. Do you think that will work? I’m done for the day. Need to sleep.

3 comments so far

The window blind is a good idea, I usually keep a box of waxed paper in the shop for glue ups. I used to use newspaper but ended up with newsprint on the bottom of a project. Grrr. It wasn’t a huge issue, but it was a dumb mistake on my part and took time to sand off.

If it makes you feel better, you’re not the only one to make glue up screw ups. I ran out of room gluing up a project here a while back. My assembly table was already full of glued up parts. So I thought about lowering the blade and using my table saw. I actually though about getting glue on my table top. So I threw a piece of scrap plywood on top of the saw table. Too bad that I didn’t think about the glue that runs out when you clamp panels actually gluing my glueup to that scrap piece of plywood. I found out the next morning just how good gorilla wood glue is. That scrap piece of plywood I had is still in the back of my shop somewhere. It’s about 3/4” of an inch thicker now though with my unusable panel still glued to it.

Sometimes we just have to learn by doing. Whehter we do it right or wrong we still learn. As I grow older I find that the problem is remembering what you’ve learned so as not to repeat the same mistake.